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A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it ki

A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else? 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisition-ipo.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...

RIMR 4mo ago
Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.
- dvt 4mo ago
  > the current political direction of the United States These kinds of comments reek echo-chamber parroting and zero substantive research. As someone that very much enjoys and carefully follows politics, the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, effectively turning Trump's administration into a 2-year lame duck. What are you even talking about?
  - paulryanrogers 4mo ago
    Will a midterm pummeling change the regulatory departments that oversee mergers and anti-trust?
    - dvt 4mo ago
      Obviously you're trying to be snarky, but I hope you realize that Congress does, in fact, have (fairly broad) statutory authority over executive agencies[1]. [1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45442 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45442
      - RIMR 4mo ago
        And I hope you realize that while Congress has authority over a lot of things, that authority is being routinely overridden by the current presidential administration, including fundamental things like spending and declaring war. So it comes across as a bit foolish to assume that any Congressional authority actually exists, or will continue to exist into the future, since we have many examples now of where that authority seemingly doesn't matter anymore. Especially since the majority of Congress is in the same party as the current President, and is making no effort not to cede congressional authority to the executive branch.
        dofm 4mo ago
        One of the things I find really interesting as a Brit is hard to put into words: Americans tell us that we don't have a constitution — when we do, it is just not wholly written down. (It is in part). We have a constitution that is flexible and precedent-based, but pretty stable, and it has emerged on top of the bits that are written down, and has amended them over time (for example, it is built in part on Magna Carta, but only two or three of its principles remain in law.) Notably a bit more of it got written when we agreed to be bound by the ECHR, but that was mostly absorbed into our understanding. It has taken us hundreds of years to get to this stability, and it is defended from attack from pretty much all sides; every government risks changing it and there is pushback each time, because you can't govern if there aren't rules. The rules are precedent and convention, and there are various authorities and archives that are consulted to work out what they are if people think they are at risk. We are regularly told by Americans that this is an intolerable thing; we need a written constitution or we can't know what our rights are! But those same Americans, right now, are engaged in exactly this process. You have a set of written rules that give Congress power over things, and you are currently evolving a set of precedents that suggest that the executive can simply wander past them and Congress somehow shows deference or refuses to assert its power in some situations. You're right at the start of building an uncodified constitution on top of the old one just as we did on top of Magna Carta. It's not entirely new to Trump; every President in my lifetime has pushed on this except maybe Carter. And sometimes they push back (Roe v. Wade was part of this uncodified constitution and probably needed to be a written amendment.) It could work out but it's important to understand that is what you're doing. And it's not just Unitary Executive theory or presidential immunity; the emergence of the Supreme Court's "shadow docket" is emblematic of the same process.
  - shipman05 4mo ago
    Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines: > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. RIMR says: > nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct: 1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation. 2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster) 3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia) 4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United. So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation. It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.
  - mcphage 4mo ago
    > the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.
  - mourgne 4mo ago
    Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect). While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point. Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.
  - jayd16 4mo ago
    Ah to have such hope. Even if I was this optimistic, the executive with a stuffed supreme court is not going to care what congress thinks. We'll sooner declare market manipulation a form of speech.
  - dofm 4mo ago
    > the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, I am not this optimistic and I think it is dangerous to be this optimistic. Even putting aside mischief, just as a matter of reality, the gap always closes. A loss, yes. Hopefully. A slap around the face, maybe. Perhaps enough to get a clear win in the House. A pummelling? Nah. I think they might still keep the Senate. Trump supporters falling out of love for him could well just lead them to focus their attention on down-ticket Republicans who figure out how to make them feel OK about their past choices, and since they need to feel OK, they will come out. Wholesale rejection of the party is unlikely since it is already splitting into two factions.
  - SecretDreams 4mo ago
    Brother I'm not clear there will be a midterm election and I'm confident most of the electorate on both sides feel very disenfranchised voting and suspect the system is not working on the level.
tgma 4mo ago
I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible: - "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai. - LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic. - Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business. - Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it. Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.
yieldcrv 4mo ago
SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right? In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards
jmintz 4mo ago
is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.
- munk-a 4mo ago
  SpaceX and everything Elon are stock companies - they're Microstrategy but with a veneer of a real business slapped on top.
  - dgellow 4mo ago
    That’s the real response. It’s all financial engineering
- two_handfuls 4mo ago
  SpaceX since the IPO is an AI company with two side projects: social networks and space. I say this based on their filing which says that the vast majority of predicted profits will come from their AI company, citing a $36.5T total addressable market.
  - SecretDreams 4mo ago
    This is peanuts compared to the 100T TAM in my prospectus around posting insightful comments on HN and Reddit that will help transform humanity.
- ilikehurdles 4mo ago
  [dead]
mikeryan 4mo ago
It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell). They’re spending Monopoly money. It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.
- munk-a 4mo ago
  Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
  - andruby 4mo ago
    What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk. It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
    - lesuorac 4mo ago
      > Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. It counts and it's not wrong. Sure, the Tesla award takes into account any M&A but growing a 2T company to 3T is a 50% increase. While growing a 1T company to 2T is a 100% increase so it's expected to be easier for him to hit his award targets with the companies merged as opposed to not merged.
      - andruby 4mo ago
        I understand Tesla acquiring other companies counting to the cap, but Tesla _being acquired_ by another company, why would that count?
        4mo ago
frde_me 4mo ago
Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor They have in-house models, and the data to train even more powerful ones. The cursor team is a proper AI lab.
- tomrod 4mo ago
  Meh. On an outcomes analysis, I've found Cursor's delivery to be exceptionally weak. Good luck to the alt-economy of SpaceTesla though, may all our 401ks survive.
- airstrike 4mo ago
  Isn't their in-house model just Kimi?
  - frde_me 4mo ago
    See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5 https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5 85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.
    - airstrike 4mo ago
      That just means it cost a lot. Does it perform meaningfully better than the Kimi model given all that extra compute? And proportionally to the amount spent?
      - frde_me 4mo ago
        That's something for us and benchmarks to decide However it definitly isn't _just_ Kimi. The weight will be different after that 85% of extra training on top of the base model. If those different weights are better are worse doesn't change that it's in most meaningful ways not the same as the base one. I would encourage you to lookup their blog posts about their post training process if you want a bit more faith that they aren't running an extra 85% of compute and burning money with no-ops.
tanseydavid 4mo ago
This Cold Fusion vid covers the "pivot" nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.
- andruby 4mo ago
  I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(
  - epsylon 4mo ago
    > SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species We already have a perfectly usable planet. It just need to be taken care of.
    - jpadkins 4mo ago
      Why not N+1 planets? Too many extinction level possibilities outside of our control.
  - njovin 4mo ago
    > was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species I don't think they were. All the Mars stuff is just dressed up version of The Boring Company - a distraction by Elon to better position his other interests. There's no money in going to Mars and there's no reason to, from a financial perspective, and Elon doesn't care about anything beyond wealth and power.
swatcoder 4mo ago
With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims. So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.
- chrisgd 4mo ago
  So buy $TSLA is your recommendation
  - mixdup 4mo ago
    Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is
    - llbbdd 4mo ago
      I mean as far as I know no human being is even a billionaire anyway if you only count cash. It's one of the things the "eat the rich" crowd is particularly bad at internalizing, that there's a difference between value and money that can be spent on food or hospitals.
      - hansonkd 4mo ago
        2,000 gold bars were stopped out of iraq. and that is just what was stopped / reported. Dictators and autocrats may or nay not have cash sitting in a bank account, but there are most likely multiple with $1B in gold.
        llbbdd 4mo ago
        Gold is value, you cannot take it to a grocer and buy food.
ctdinjeu7 4mo ago
Didn’t you see Moon? They need a Gerdy
modeless 4mo ago
Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity. Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough to build a whole city on Mars within our lifetimes. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only near-term way.
- throw310822 4mo ago
  > Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.
  - modeless 4mo ago
    Cursor also has a large customer base including most of the Fortune 500, talent, and their own coding model and training infrastructure using their data. You wouldn't get those automatically by subsidizing Claude, and the many months or even years it would take to ramp up your own IDE/coding hardness from scratch and acquire customers to match Cursor would put you way behind in a field where the SOTA climbs every month. It's also not clear that Anthropic would let you undercut everyone else using their API; they could cut you off at any time. That would be a very precarious position.
devops000 4mo ago
They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
munk-a 4mo ago
If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle. If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.
- verzali 4mo ago
  I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.
  - munk-a 4mo ago
    If he was smart it'd be to a very limited extent. If you have this much wealth in something as unpredictable as the stock market I think the very wise move is to start converting it into stock backed loans[1] that you leverage to buy real assets - buy islands and small countries, buy other successful large companies and just let them keep trending slowly upwards, pick up that New Zealand bunker... just try and get your money diversified and into things that would survive a stock price collapse. Even if Elon did this with 1% or 10% of his wealth and kept the vast majority of his assets invested in this one clump of companies and they went to zero he'd still be sitting on an insane pile of cash. 1. Lets all pour out a drink to the bankers who authorize such insane loan agreements.
- over_bridge 4mo ago
  How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company
  - LearnYouALisp 4mo ago
    Who has the gold makes the rules
ConanRus 4mo ago
[dead]
drewda 4mo ago
The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit. And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers. So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.
- joshuastuden 4mo ago
  SpaceX also wants to put data centers in space. That's the big market for SpaceX and how it ties into AI.
  - monegator 4mo ago
    yes musk said that, but that's retarded, a statement made to fill as many bingo spaces as possible
    - jonator 4mo ago
      Energy will be the biggest bottleneck to data centers on land. Is not an issue in space. Space is the perfect env for running compute.
      - deadbolt 4mo ago
        What about the heat?
      - andruby 4mo ago
        Space-grade photovoltaics are >10x more expensive than ground based panels. Add some (Tesla) utility scale batteries and it can run 24/7. No need for expensive radiators or rocket launches. And personnel can upgrade the hardware every time there's a new generation of GPU's. Putting datacenters in deserts around the equator is a much better idea than in Space. If you're really optimizing for cost that is. If you're optimizing for SpaceX meme-stock valuation the former wins
sharts 4mo ago
Gotta pump that stock price with constant news buzz
ignoramous 4mo ago
> bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else SPACx designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced ponzis on pyramids. The company will be re-founded every year by Xlon Tusk to revolutionize capitalism, with the ultimate goal of making market multilevel. spacX has gained VC attention for a series of web3 milestones: It is the only AI company ever to run a 1000B-A3000-Thinkkking on low-Cost toasters, which it first accomplished in May 1945. Grokipedia made history again when its ClosedAI attached to Moonshot Kimi, exchanged token payloads, and returned Alignment to money — a deeply challenging feat previously accomplished only by Cursor 60B. Since then it has distilled cargo to and from Moonshot multiple times, providing regular RL missions for Goog.
outside1234 4mo ago
SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.
- smileson2 4mo ago
  I’m worried all this crap will distract and damage the things they are great at (rockets) similar to what happened to Tesla where outside the stock price it’s pretty dismal
- y2244 4mo ago
  Like Tesla the stock is held by many powerful and rich people. Elon is smart and doesn't buy things alone, he brings in many people so they all have a interest to protect their investment.
red-iron-pine 4mo ago
yeah but someone -- no one has explained who -- still thinks this is a good idea
toephu2 4mo ago
Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations. SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI. This acquisition helps with the 3rd one.
- grokcodec 4mo ago
  They compared the acquisition to hospitals because "think of the children!"
- hadlock 4mo ago
  This is the same straw man argument of "country Z has N homeless/unhoused people, why are they building a space/military/education widget for $Y price, when they haven't found homes for N unhoused people yet?"
  - grokcodec 4mo ago
    yes, whataboutism at its finest
  - tootie 4mo ago
    Except businesses tend be focused on core competencies and not sprawling in a lot of unrelated directions.
petre 4mo ago
How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.
- throwaway152321 4mo ago
  It might not be irrational if there is more revenue in people who are willing to spend money on internet messages than there are on those willing to spend for nuclear reactors.
  - SecretDreams 4mo ago
    So far, I see way more companies paying each other in a circular fashion than individuals forking out anything near whatever tam SpaceX is projecting for AI.
- Ray20 4mo ago
  I think it has something to do with the fact that the first company is better at spreading messages on the Internet than the other at building reactors.
risyachka 4mo ago
Smart move as they will pay in stock, and if stock is overvalued by 2x this means you get 50% discount
FuriouslyAdrift 4mo ago
xAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX and runs several of the worlds largest compute datacenters.
tencentshill 4mo ago
Tesla isn't a car company anymore either.
chasd00 4mo ago
It’s not real money, there’s no check being written for that amount and then deposited into someone’s bank account.
sva_ 4mo ago
> all-stock deal It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. I always find it troublesome that we generally conflate cash with stonks, market caps, and such.
- stymaar 4mo ago
  > It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. They probably have a vesting period of some sort (as they would with cash as well) but beyond that they will definitely be able to cash out all of their money as soon as they are allowed to. $60B is 3% of SpaceX at today's valuation, Musk had no issue selling this amount of Tesla shares to buy Twitter. The idea that stocks are somehow not liquid is an nonsensical urban legend.
slashdave 4mo ago
Might be a play for talent. Recruiting in this space is hard... and expensive
- cromka 4mo ago
  50 billion worth of talent?
iamtheworstdev 4mo ago
when you see the list of major investors in Cursor that will never break even if it stays independent, and compare it to the investors in SpaceX, it all makes sense.
grim_io 4mo ago
It is crazy that a company like SpaceX was allowed to exist. The whole big tech industry needs Microsoft/MSN style breakups again.
digitaltrees 4mo ago
Because cursor gets some of the highest quality training data from the world's programmers and responses from the full ecosystem of model vendors and access to active code bases. XAI wants the data.
- anukin 4mo ago
  Highest is extremely subjective in case of cursor. It’s not exactly used by the experienced programmers and caters mainly to neophytes
  - w10-1 4mo ago
    > caters mainly to neophytes Perhaps that's where the money and strategy is. (a) stronger need; (b) if you can build systems without real expertise, you don't have to stomach their salaries or politics.
  - digitaltrees 4mo ago
    Umm. It’s real development work in real settings with real model output. That is a high quality dataset. The fact that it isn’t good code from elite engineers is confusing what good means in the context of coding agents. First is how to respond to a range of prompts. For that you need diverse real world conversations. Second is the ability to respond with good code. That is about labeling or other data curation after the fact or other training methods. So it’s a downstream consideration
- bdamm 4mo ago
  Ah hah, this is it. I was also confused - the tool isn't the thing. It's the behavior analysis capability.
  - scottyah 4mo ago
    Plus user-funded model distillation lol.
wuliwong 4mo ago
XAi is part of SpaceX.
scotty79 4mo ago
Please don't let Musk know that his money can be used for the real world, mundane stuff. Because he will buy 150 hospitals and drive them to ruin, private equity style. We are way better off when he pays abstract amounts of it for abstract stuff to some random nerds and grifters. His money is not a resource that could be put to any good use. It's a liability for all of us.
MangoCoffee 4mo ago
>One of the things that makes @SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation. https://x.com/BillAckman/status/2066866144154161555?s=20 https://x.com/BillAckman/status/2066866144154161555?s=20
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
gwbas1c 4mo ago
Space exploration requires significant software development. Take a look at the Apollo 11 movie: There was quite significant computing power for the 1960s putting a person on the moon.
ursuscamp 4mo ago
SpaceX is planning to do data centers in orbit. Engineering issues aside, that might dovetail with Cursor nicely if timings work out.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  I cannot believe full grown adult are taking that seriously
  - chinathrow 4mo ago
    As long as the stock goes up, everyone is happy, right?
  - sensanaty 4mo ago
    [dead]
WheatMillington 4mo ago
Why do you think it's a space company? SpaceX didn't even define ITSELF as a space company in its IPO filing.
- scottyah 4mo ago
  Weak. Would Yamaha list itself as just a musical instrument company?
- manquer 4mo ago
  it is called SpaceX . Hardly the fault of anyone is it for not reading a 100+page document meant for investors when it literally in the name . If they don’t want us to think of them as a Space company they could have taken the xAI name (like how grammarly did with superhuman) or called it Musk Inc or whatever else.
h14h 4mo ago
SpaceX isn't a space company anymore, it's an AI company. In their IPO filing, of their projected $28T total addressable market, only $370B (~1-2%) of that is from space [1]. The rest is primarily AI, with a sprinkling of Telecom revenue from Starlink. Given xAI's Grok is way behind ChatGPT & Claude on coding capabilities, whereas Cursor was able to get in spitting distance of them w/ Composer 2.5 by simply running post-training on Kimi K2.5, I'm not sure Elon could dream up a more perfect strategic fit. Cursor likely has the largest, highest quality dataset of any private firm for training new coding models, which would compete SpaceX's trifecta of becoming a viable competitor in the AI race: 1. Access to compute (they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google) 2. Liquidity for R&D+M&A (largest IPO in history) 3. High quality training data (this Cursor acquisition) > Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else? In a vacuum, absolutely yes. But in the bizarre context of the AI economics, chaotically scrambling to bring everything you need to compete in-house makes perfect sense. Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute, are the most financially liquid, and (assuming the Cursor acquisition goes through) have the largest corpus of high quality training data. We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO. So when you look at this as a $60B play to capture an additional 10-20% of an estimated $26T total addressable market, it makes a lot more sense. Now, whether that projected TAM is even remotely close to reality (or even just enough to make Cursor worth $60B) is another question entirely. [1]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2026/05/20/spacexs-ipo-filing-gives-first-look-into-companys-financials/ https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2026/05/20/spacexs-ip... * edited to add source for IPO numbers & tweak grammar/formatting
- CobrastanJorji 4mo ago
  No, it really still makes no sense. Where's the moat around what Cursor provides? If Cursor is really that great, surely something equally great could be developed for a measly $1 billion or so? Is it brand recognition? An established customer base? Surely they don't have $60 billion worth of either.
  - h14h 4mo ago
ornornor 4mo ago
I wish we’d stopped calling him Elon like he’s a family uncle or something. I chuckled at Heilon Musk, but I’d settle for just Musk.
legulere 4mo ago
Part of Elon Musks strategy seems to sell some kind of hype that does not materialise or at least won't for long (Mars, autonomous Cars) The vast amounts of money collected are then used to develop products that are still a significant progress in its market. Now AI is where all the hype is. It's difficult to sell some hype without AI currently.
smrtinsert 4mo ago
Giving retail traders a reason to turn their life savings into exit liquidity
toss1 4mo ago
Since Cursor is kind of a Select-Your-Model front end for various AI coding systems, how much of it could be to just make sure Grok gets to the top or default choice of that Select-Your-Model list?
fhsm 4mo ago
> 150 of world’s most expensive modern hospitals https://sfyimby.com/2024/06/construction-underway-for-4-3-billion-ucsf-parnassus-heights-expansion-san-francisco.html https://sfyimby.com/2024/06/construction-underway-for-4-3-bi... Probably not the most expensive , just first I thought of … so maybe it’s more like 10-15 typical urban hospitals.
sgjohnson 4mo ago
Evidently, at some point money just stops being real. Also, it's not even $60b. It's a 100% stock deal. The markets have quite literally given Elon a carte blanche. Can it last forever? I doubt it.
mnehring 4mo ago
I bought a small amount (4 shares) of SpaceX stock on IPO day for $160/share. This Cursor purchase does not upset me as a very minor shareholder. Elon Musk seems to have a unique ability to help grow companies that lead to shareholder value. In particular, it seems that xAI overbuilt data centers because their model fell behind. SpaceX could lease data center capacity to Google or other big players (which they're doing), or they can use it internally. Buying Cursor lets them do it internally. My employer recently switched us all from Cursor to Claude Code. Aside from my personal preference for having a chat window inside VSCode, Claude Code is painfully slow compared to Cursor for my workloads. I think part of this is due to Claude's massive bump in popularity without a similarly rapid build-out of compute. So, the low-hanging fruit for Cursor is to have a massive speed advantage over Claude Code and regain popularity that way. (My current paid AI subscriptions are ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor. I do not personally pay for Claude.) And as far as the pivot goes, there seems to be speculation that Elon Musk wishes to roll up all his companies into one big company. So, it doesn't really matter if the AI company lives inside SpaceX or Tesla, since it'll all be one big thing in the future.
port11 4mo ago
Back-of-the-napkin math tells me Google’s top 20 acquisitions combined are cheaper than Cursor.
philkuz 4mo ago
Composer-2.5 is a good model, grok-4 is not. Its that simple.
guluarte 4mo ago
I would agree but in this case they are buying the talent and the data.
AbstractH24 4mo ago
Prediction -- SpaceX rebrands within a decade like Meta or Alphabet. And they turn out to be a AI company not a space company.

RIMR 4mo ago

Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.

dvt 4mo ago
> the current political direction of the United States These kinds of comments reek echo-chamber parroting and zero substantive research. As someone that very much enjoys and carefully follows politics, the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, effectively turning Trump's administration into a 2-year lame duck. What are you even talking about?
- paulryanrogers 4mo ago
  Will a midterm pummeling change the regulatory departments that oversee mergers and anti-trust?
  - dvt 4mo ago
    Obviously you're trying to be snarky, but I hope you realize that Congress does, in fact, have (fairly broad) statutory authority over executive agencies[1]. [1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45442 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45442
    - RIMR 4mo ago
      And I hope you realize that while Congress has authority over a lot of things, that authority is being routinely overridden by the current presidential administration, including fundamental things like spending and declaring war. So it comes across as a bit foolish to assume that any Congressional authority actually exists, or will continue to exist into the future, since we have many examples now of where that authority seemingly doesn't matter anymore. Especially since the majority of Congress is in the same party as the current President, and is making no effort not to cede congressional authority to the executive branch.
      - dofm 4mo ago
        One of the things I find really interesting as a Brit is hard to put into words: Americans tell us that we don't have a constitution — when we do, it is just not wholly written down. (It is in part). We have a constitution that is flexible and precedent-based, but pretty stable, and it has emerged on top of the bits that are written down, and has amended them over time (for example, it is built in part on Magna Carta, but only two or three of its principles remain in law.) Notably a bit more of it got written when we agreed to be bound by the ECHR, but that was mostly absorbed into our understanding. It has taken us hundreds of years to get to this stability, and it is defended from attack from pretty much all sides; every government risks changing it and there is pushback each time, because you can't govern if there aren't rules. The rules are precedent and convention, and there are various authorities and archives that are consulted to work out what they are if people think they are at risk. We are regularly told by Americans that this is an intolerable thing; we need a written constitution or we can't know what our rights are! But those same Americans, right now, are engaged in exactly this process. You have a set of written rules that give Congress power over things, and you are currently evolving a set of precedents that suggest that the executive can simply wander past them and Congress somehow shows deference or refuses to assert its power in some situations. You're right at the start of building an uncodified constitution on top of the old one just as we did on top of Magna Carta. It's not entirely new to Trump; every President in my lifetime has pushed on this except maybe Carter. And sometimes they push back (Roe v. Wade was part of this uncodified constitution and probably needed to be a written amendment.) It could work out but it's important to understand that is what you're doing. And it's not just Unitary Executive theory or presidential immunity; the emergence of the Supreme Court's "shadow docket" is emblematic of the same process.
- shipman05 4mo ago
  Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines: > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. RIMR says: > nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct: 1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation. 2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster) 3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia) 4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United. So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation. It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.
- mcphage 4mo ago
  > the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.
- mourgne 4mo ago
  Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect). While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point. Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.
- jayd16 4mo ago
  Ah to have such hope. Even if I was this optimistic, the executive with a stuffed supreme court is not going to care what congress thinks. We'll sooner declare market manipulation a form of speech.
- dofm 4mo ago
  > the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, I am not this optimistic and I think it is dangerous to be this optimistic. Even putting aside mischief, just as a matter of reality, the gap always closes. A loss, yes. Hopefully. A slap around the face, maybe. Perhaps enough to get a clear win in the House. A pummelling? Nah. I think they might still keep the Senate. Trump supporters falling out of love for him could well just lead them to focus their attention on down-ticket Republicans who figure out how to make them feel OK about their past choices, and since they need to feel OK, they will come out. Wholesale rejection of the party is unlikely since it is already splitting into two factions.
- SecretDreams 4mo ago
  Brother I'm not clear there will be a midterm election and I'm confident most of the electorate on both sides feel very disenfranchised voting and suspect the system is not working on the level.

tgma 4mo ago

I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible: - "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai. - LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic. - Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business. - Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it. Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.

yieldcrv 4mo ago

SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right? In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards

jmintz 4mo ago

is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.

munk-a 4mo ago
SpaceX and everything Elon are stock companies - they're Microstrategy but with a veneer of a real business slapped on top.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  That’s the real response. It’s all financial engineering
two_handfuls 4mo ago
SpaceX since the IPO is an AI company with two side projects: social networks and space. I say this based on their filing which says that the vast majority of predicted profits will come from their AI company, citing a $36.5T total addressable market.
- SecretDreams 4mo ago
  This is peanuts compared to the 100T TAM in my prospectus around posting insightful comments on HN and Reddit that will help transform humanity.
ilikehurdles 4mo ago
[dead]

mikeryan 4mo ago

It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell). They’re spending Monopoly money. It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.

munk-a 4mo ago
Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
- andruby 4mo ago
  What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk. It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
  - lesuorac 4mo ago
    > Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. It counts and it's not wrong. Sure, the Tesla award takes into account any M&A but growing a 2T company to 3T is a 50% increase. While growing a 1T company to 2T is a 100% increase so it's expected to be easier for him to hit his award targets with the companies merged as opposed to not merged.
    - andruby 4mo ago
      I understand Tesla acquiring other companies counting to the cap, but Tesla _being acquired_ by another company, why would that count?
      - 4mo ago

frde_me 4mo ago

Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor They have in-house models, and the data to train even more powerful ones. The cursor team is a proper AI lab.

tomrod 4mo ago
Meh. On an outcomes analysis, I've found Cursor's delivery to be exceptionally weak. Good luck to the alt-economy of SpaceTesla though, may all our 401ks survive.
airstrike 4mo ago
Isn't their in-house model just Kimi?
- frde_me 4mo ago
  See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5 https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5 85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.
  - airstrike 4mo ago
    That just means it cost a lot. Does it perform meaningfully better than the Kimi model given all that extra compute? And proportionally to the amount spent?
    - frde_me 4mo ago
      That's something for us and benchmarks to decide However it definitly isn't _just_ Kimi. The weight will be different after that 85% of extra training on top of the base model. If those different weights are better are worse doesn't change that it's in most meaningful ways not the same as the base one. I would encourage you to lookup their blog posts about their post training process if you want a bit more faith that they aren't running an extra 85% of compute and burning money with no-ops.

tanseydavid 4mo ago

This Cold Fusion vid covers the "pivot" nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.

andruby 4mo ago
I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(
- epsylon 4mo ago
  > SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species We already have a perfectly usable planet. It just need to be taken care of.
  - jpadkins 4mo ago
    Why not N+1 planets? Too many extinction level possibilities outside of our control.
- njovin 4mo ago
  > was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species I don't think they were. All the Mars stuff is just dressed up version of The Boring Company - a distraction by Elon to better position his other interests. There's no money in going to Mars and there's no reason to, from a financial perspective, and Elon doesn't care about anything beyond wealth and power.

swatcoder 4mo ago

With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims. So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.

chrisgd 4mo ago
So buy $TSLA is your recommendation
- mixdup 4mo ago
  Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is
  - llbbdd 4mo ago
    I mean as far as I know no human being is even a billionaire anyway if you only count cash. It's one of the things the "eat the rich" crowd is particularly bad at internalizing, that there's a difference between value and money that can be spent on food or hospitals.
    - hansonkd 4mo ago
      2,000 gold bars were stopped out of iraq. and that is just what was stopped / reported. Dictators and autocrats may or nay not have cash sitting in a bank account, but there are most likely multiple with $1B in gold.
      - llbbdd 4mo ago
        Gold is value, you cannot take it to a grocer and buy food.

ctdinjeu7 4mo ago

Didn’t you see Moon? They need a Gerdy

modeless 4mo ago

Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity. Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough to build a whole city on Mars within our lifetimes. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only near-term way.

throw310822 4mo ago
> Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.
- modeless 4mo ago
  Cursor also has a large customer base including most of the Fortune 500, talent, and their own coding model and training infrastructure using their data. You wouldn't get those automatically by subsidizing Claude, and the many months or even years it would take to ramp up your own IDE/coding hardness from scratch and acquire customers to match Cursor would put you way behind in a field where the SOTA climbs every month. It's also not clear that Anthropic would let you undercut everyone else using their API; they could cut you off at any time. That would be a very precarious position.

devops000 4mo ago

They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

munk-a 4mo ago

If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle. If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.

verzali 4mo ago
I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.
- munk-a 4mo ago
  If he was smart it'd be to a very limited extent. If you have this much wealth in something as unpredictable as the stock market I think the very wise move is to start converting it into stock backed loans[1] that you leverage to buy real assets - buy islands and small countries, buy other successful large companies and just let them keep trending slowly upwards, pick up that New Zealand bunker... just try and get your money diversified and into things that would survive a stock price collapse. Even if Elon did this with 1% or 10% of his wealth and kept the vast majority of his assets invested in this one clump of companies and they went to zero he'd still be sitting on an insane pile of cash. 1. Lets all pour out a drink to the bankers who authorize such insane loan agreements.
over_bridge 4mo ago
How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company
- LearnYouALisp 4mo ago
  Who has the gold makes the rules

ConanRus 4mo ago

[dead]

drewda 4mo ago

The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit. And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers. So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.

joshuastuden 4mo ago
SpaceX also wants to put data centers in space. That's the big market for SpaceX and how it ties into AI.
- monegator 4mo ago
  yes musk said that, but that's retarded, a statement made to fill as many bingo spaces as possible
  - jonator 4mo ago
    Energy will be the biggest bottleneck to data centers on land. Is not an issue in space. Space is the perfect env for running compute.
    - deadbolt 4mo ago
      What about the heat?
    - andruby 4mo ago
      Space-grade photovoltaics are >10x more expensive than ground based panels. Add some (Tesla) utility scale batteries and it can run 24/7. No need for expensive radiators or rocket launches. And personnel can upgrade the hardware every time there's a new generation of GPU's. Putting datacenters in deserts around the equator is a much better idea than in Space. If you're really optimizing for cost that is. If you're optimizing for SpaceX meme-stock valuation the former wins

sharts 4mo ago

Gotta pump that stock price with constant news buzz

ignoramous 4mo ago

> bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else SPACx designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced ponzis on pyramids. The company will be re-founded every year by Xlon Tusk to revolutionize capitalism, with the ultimate goal of making market multilevel. spacX has gained VC attention for a series of web3 milestones: It is the only AI company ever to run a 1000B-A3000-Thinkkking on low-Cost toasters, which it first accomplished in May 1945. Grokipedia made history again when its ClosedAI attached to Moonshot Kimi, exchanged token payloads, and returned Alignment to money — a deeply challenging feat previously accomplished only by Cursor 60B. Since then it has distilled cargo to and from Moonshot multiple times, providing regular RL missions for Goog.

outside1234 4mo ago

SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.

smileson2 4mo ago
I’m worried all this crap will distract and damage the things they are great at (rockets) similar to what happened to Tesla where outside the stock price it’s pretty dismal
y2244 4mo ago
Like Tesla the stock is held by many powerful and rich people. Elon is smart and doesn't buy things alone, he brings in many people so they all have a interest to protect their investment.

red-iron-pine 4mo ago

yeah but someone -- no one has explained who -- still thinks this is a good idea

toephu2 4mo ago

Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations. SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI. This acquisition helps with the 3rd one.

grokcodec 4mo ago
They compared the acquisition to hospitals because "think of the children!"
hadlock 4mo ago
This is the same straw man argument of "country Z has N homeless/unhoused people, why are they building a space/military/education widget for $Y price, when they haven't found homes for N unhoused people yet?"
- grokcodec 4mo ago
  yes, whataboutism at its finest
- tootie 4mo ago
  Except businesses tend be focused on core competencies and not sprawling in a lot of unrelated directions.

petre 4mo ago

How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.

throwaway152321 4mo ago
It might not be irrational if there is more revenue in people who are willing to spend money on internet messages than there are on those willing to spend for nuclear reactors.
- SecretDreams 4mo ago
  So far, I see way more companies paying each other in a circular fashion than individuals forking out anything near whatever tam SpaceX is projecting for AI.
Ray20 4mo ago
I think it has something to do with the fact that the first company is better at spreading messages on the Internet than the other at building reactors.

risyachka 4mo ago

Smart move as they will pay in stock, and if stock is overvalued by 2x this means you get 50% discount

FuriouslyAdrift 4mo ago

xAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX and runs several of the worlds largest compute datacenters.

tencentshill 4mo ago

Tesla isn't a car company anymore either.

chasd00 4mo ago

It’s not real money, there’s no check being written for that amount and then deposited into someone’s bank account.

sva_ 4mo ago

> all-stock deal It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. I always find it troublesome that we generally conflate cash with stonks, market caps, and such.

stymaar 4mo ago
> It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. They probably have a vesting period of some sort (as they would with cash as well) but beyond that they will definitely be able to cash out all of their money as soon as they are allowed to. $60B is 3% of SpaceX at today's valuation, Musk had no issue selling this amount of Tesla shares to buy Twitter. The idea that stocks are somehow not liquid is an nonsensical urban legend.

slashdave 4mo ago

Might be a play for talent. Recruiting in this space is hard... and expensive

cromka 4mo ago
50 billion worth of talent?

iamtheworstdev 4mo ago

when you see the list of major investors in Cursor that will never break even if it stays independent, and compare it to the investors in SpaceX, it all makes sense.

grim_io 4mo ago

It is crazy that a company like SpaceX was allowed to exist. The whole big tech industry needs Microsoft/MSN style breakups again.

digitaltrees 4mo ago

Because cursor gets some of the highest quality training data from the world's programmers and responses from the full ecosystem of model vendors and access to active code bases. XAI wants the data.

anukin 4mo ago
Highest is extremely subjective in case of cursor. It’s not exactly used by the experienced programmers and caters mainly to neophytes
- w10-1 4mo ago
  > caters mainly to neophytes Perhaps that's where the money and strategy is. (a) stronger need; (b) if you can build systems without real expertise, you don't have to stomach their salaries or politics.
- digitaltrees 4mo ago
  Umm. It’s real development work in real settings with real model output. That is a high quality dataset. The fact that it isn’t good code from elite engineers is confusing what good means in the context of coding agents. First is how to respond to a range of prompts. For that you need diverse real world conversations. Second is the ability to respond with good code. That is about labeling or other data curation after the fact or other training methods. So it’s a downstream consideration
bdamm 4mo ago
Ah hah, this is it. I was also confused - the tool isn't the thing. It's the behavior analysis capability.
- scottyah 4mo ago
  Plus user-funded model distillation lol.

wuliwong 4mo ago

XAi is part of SpaceX.

scotty79 4mo ago

Please don't let Musk know that his money can be used for the real world, mundane stuff. Because he will buy 150 hospitals and drive them to ruin, private equity style. We are way better off when he pays abstract amounts of it for abstract stuff to some random nerds and grifters. His money is not a resource that could be put to any good use. It's a liability for all of us.

MangoCoffee 4mo ago

>One of the things that makes @SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation. https://x.com/BillAckman/status/2066866144154161555?s=20 https://x.com/BillAckman/status/2066866144154161555?s=20

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

gwbas1c 4mo ago

Space exploration requires significant software development. Take a look at the Apollo 11 movie: There was quite significant computing power for the 1960s putting a person on the moon.

ursuscamp 4mo ago

SpaceX is planning to do data centers in orbit. Engineering issues aside, that might dovetail with Cursor nicely if timings work out.

dgellow 4mo ago
I cannot believe full grown adult are taking that seriously
- chinathrow 4mo ago
  As long as the stock goes up, everyone is happy, right?
- sensanaty 4mo ago
  [dead]

WheatMillington 4mo ago

Why do you think it's a space company? SpaceX didn't even define ITSELF as a space company in its IPO filing.

scottyah 4mo ago
Weak. Would Yamaha list itself as just a musical instrument company?
manquer 4mo ago
it is called SpaceX . Hardly the fault of anyone is it for not reading a 100+page document meant for investors when it literally in the name . If they don’t want us to think of them as a Space company they could have taken the xAI name (like how grammarly did with superhuman) or called it Musk Inc or whatever else.

h14h 4mo ago

SpaceX isn't a space company anymore, it's an AI company. In their IPO filing, of their projected $28T total addressable market, only $370B (~1-2%) of that is from space [1]. The rest is primarily AI, with a sprinkling of Telecom revenue from Starlink. Given xAI's Grok is way behind ChatGPT & Claude on coding capabilities, whereas Cursor was able to get in spitting distance of them w/ Composer 2.5 by simply running post-training on Kimi K2.5, I'm not sure Elon could dream up a more perfect strategic fit. Cursor likely has the largest, highest quality dataset of any private firm for training new coding models, which would compete SpaceX's trifecta of becoming a viable competitor in the AI race: 1. Access to compute (they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google) 2. Liquidity for R&D+M&A (largest IPO in history) 3. High quality training data (this Cursor acquisition) > Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else? In a vacuum, absolutely yes. But in the bizarre context of the AI economics, chaotically scrambling to bring everything you need to compete in-house makes perfect sense. Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute, are the most financially liquid, and (assuming the Cursor acquisition goes through) have the largest corpus of high quality training data. We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO. So when you look at this as a $60B play to capture an additional 10-20% of an estimated $26T total addressable market, it makes a lot more sense. Now, whether that projected TAM is even remotely close to reality (or even just enough to make Cursor worth $60B) is another question entirely. [1]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2026/05/20/spacexs-ipo-filing-gives-first-look-into-companys-financials/ https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2026/05/20/spacexs-ip... * edited to add source for IPO numbers & tweak grammar/formatting

CobrastanJorji 4mo ago
No, it really still makes no sense. Where's the moat around what Cursor provides? If Cursor is really that great, surely something equally great could be developed for a measly $1 billion or so? Is it brand recognition? An established customer base? Surely they don't have $60 billion worth of either.
- h14h 4mo ago

ornornor 4mo ago

I wish we’d stopped calling him Elon like he’s a family uncle or something. I chuckled at Heilon Musk, but I’d settle for just Musk.

legulere 4mo ago

Part of Elon Musks strategy seems to sell some kind of hype that does not materialise or at least won't for long (Mars, autonomous Cars) The vast amounts of money collected are then used to develop products that are still a significant progress in its market. Now AI is where all the hype is. It's difficult to sell some hype without AI currently.

smrtinsert 4mo ago

Giving retail traders a reason to turn their life savings into exit liquidity

toss1 4mo ago

Since Cursor is kind of a Select-Your-Model front end for various AI coding systems, how much of it could be to just make sure Grok gets to the top or default choice of that Select-Your-Model list?

fhsm 4mo ago

> 150 of world’s most expensive modern hospitals https://sfyimby.com/2024/06/construction-underway-for-4-3-billion-ucsf-parnassus-heights-expansion-san-francisco.html https://sfyimby.com/2024/06/construction-underway-for-4-3-bi... Probably not the most expensive , just first I thought of … so maybe it’s more like 10-15 typical urban hospitals.

sgjohnson 4mo ago

Evidently, at some point money just stops being real. Also, it's not even $60b. It's a 100% stock deal. The markets have quite literally given Elon a carte blanche. Can it last forever? I doubt it.

mnehring 4mo ago

I bought a small amount (4 shares) of SpaceX stock on IPO day for $160/share. This Cursor purchase does not upset me as a very minor shareholder. Elon Musk seems to have a unique ability to help grow companies that lead to shareholder value. In particular, it seems that xAI overbuilt data centers because their model fell behind. SpaceX could lease data center capacity to Google or other big players (which they're doing), or they can use it internally. Buying Cursor lets them do it internally. My employer recently switched us all from Cursor to Claude Code. Aside from my personal preference for having a chat window inside VSCode, Claude Code is painfully slow compared to Cursor for my workloads. I think part of this is due to Claude's massive bump in popularity without a similarly rapid build-out of compute. So, the low-hanging fruit for Cursor is to have a massive speed advantage over Claude Code and regain popularity that way. (My current paid AI subscriptions are ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor. I do not personally pay for Claude.) And as far as the pivot goes, there seems to be speculation that Elon Musk wishes to roll up all his companies into one big company. So, it doesn't really matter if the AI company lives inside SpaceX or Tesla, since it'll all be one big thing in the future.

port11 4mo ago

Back-of-the-napkin math tells me Google’s top 20 acquisitions combined are cheaper than Cursor.

philkuz 4mo ago

Composer-2.5 is a good model, grok-4 is not. Its that simple.

guluarte 4mo ago

I would agree but in this case they are buying the talent and the data.

AbstractH24 4mo ago

Prediction -- SpaceX rebrands within a decade like Meta or Alphabet. And they turn out to be a AI company not a space company.